Using An FTP Client To Upload/Download Files

Many a times, you would require to connect to your web hosting account via FTP to upload/download files. Though cPanel has an amazing ‘File Manager’ feature, it wouldn’t always cater to your needs for file transfer as good as an FTP client does.

There are a lot of FTP clients out there available for free download. FileZilla is a decent one.

The entire concept is fairly simple.

1. You have your FTP login details with you.

2. You connect to your account via any FTP client using the available logins.

3. You upload/download files using your FTP client.

1. FTP login details

Your cPanel logins are your primary FTP login details. You can use these credentials to connect to your account. However, please note that these logins will grant access to your entire home directory and anyone with these details can access any of your files.

This is where additional FTP accounts come into picture. These are the accounts that you create when you want to limit access of the account, to a specific directory of your choice.

An ideal scenario would be, where you hire a web-designer to design your addon domain for you. You create an FTP account and limit access of this account to the document root of your addon domain. This ensures that your web-designer accesses only contents of the site that he’s supposed to develop.

2. Connecting to your FTP client

Now that you have your FTP account ready, it’s all about entering these details to your FTP client.

The main details you would require normally are –

Host – This could be your domain name itself, as long as it resolves to the right server. If not, you could provide your server’s hostname or IP address in this field.

Username – This could either be your cPanel username or any of the FTP accounts that you just created. This username decides where you land in, once you are connected.

Password – The password of your FTP account.

Port – The FTP port on a cPanel server is 21.

Directory – Using the right directory is very important. Should you be logging in with your cPanel logins, you will be connected to your home directory /home/username. In order to have your contents published to your main domain, you should be specifying your directory as public_html. However, if you are logging in with any of the FTP accounts that you just created, you need to specify / as the directory. This will ensure that you land in the directory to which your account has been granted access.

3. Upload/downloading of files

This is something you would have no trouble in doing, once you are connected. The interface of all FTP clients are fairly simple and self-explanatory, where you can copy contents from your local machine to your hosting account and vice versa. You can refer to the online-documentation of these FTP clients, should you have any doubts.